Airport + Intro

The problems for a blizzard-bound international Airport are worsened by a crazy bomber on an incoming flight...

Nominated for 10 Oscars, and the second highest grossing film of 1970, Airport ushered in a brief but very successful era of movies that shared a starry ensemble cast and a plot hanging on impending doom. Burt Lancaster is trying to keep his airport open during a snowstorm, and his wife and future mistress happy, and Dean Martin’s pilot has a wife and chief stewardess to contend with. Helen Hayes, meanwhile, won an Oscar for her role as a serial airborne stowaway. If that’s not enough, Van Heflin plays a suicidal man on board a plane with a briefcase and a crazy insurance payout plan. Uh-oh.

About Disaster! Season

This film is part of our Disaster! mini season, a short season curated by Jamie Sellers, celebrating the brief golden age of those blockbuster American movies that used a looming or ongoing disaster as their main plot device, this being roughly a period through the early 1970s.

These movies had A-list ensemble casts of Hollywood stars past and then-present, and directors with an eye for the dramatic. Irony is all but absent – no-one’s tipping the wink to the viewer, everyone’s deadly serious, and quite often very angry too. It IS okay to laugh though, on occasion – in fact, we defy you not to.

Plot devices might feature an arrogant or careless authority figure whose actions (or lack of) are partly or entirely responsible for the unfolding chaos; a blue-collar folk hero whose down- to-earth commonsense ultimately averts an even worse scenario; and often a stupid kid who ignores every danger sign and puts him or herself in grave mortal danger. Warning: it’s the early ‘70s, and chauvinism is not in short supply.

Jamie Sellers is a freelance Music Curator, extreme quizmaster, and occasional singer. He’s been volunteering at the Electric Palace since September 2019. He watches around 250 films a year, and counts among his favourites The Hustler, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Ordet. His favourite current directors are Alice Rohrwacher, Kelly Reichardt, Francois Ozon and Christian Petzold.

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